Friday, March 30, 2012

The stench of death rose up like a cloud around him and he grinned,
inhaling with a joy he hadn't felt in years. There was nothing quite so
delightfully aromatic as the delectable coppery scent of blood pooling
and clotting.

He wasn't sure exactly when he'd felt so alive and
it gave him a thrill to know that his joy came from their deaths. His
eyes moved lovingly over the shattered corpses at his feet and he sighed
"Oh, Tommy, look at what we've done now."

In his mind his best
friend grinned up at him from the belly of the corpse nearest him, his
enigmatic smile stained with the blood and effluence seeping from the
body he had been gnawing on.

In reality, Frank Gomez was standing
in his kitchen facing a corner caught completely in his dreams, thoroughly believing he was standing atop the bodies of those who had
taken his son.

Ten years earlier Frank had been diagnosed with
schizophrenia. But rather than live a sort of half life (where all he
wanted was to die) because of the pills' side effects, Frank chose to
remain untreated and suffer the vivid hallucinations and memory loss
that accompanied a degenerative disease like that with which he was
cursed.

Because of his hallucinations, Franks's ex had won full
custody of their boy, Marcus. Frank had been punished for his choice to forego treatment and was only allowed to see his kid when his ex okayed
it. Even then, he was to be supervised the whole time he visited the boy.

It had pretty much broken him. When Samantha took Mark from him, he felt
dead inside. The emotional trauma did something to his disease, it was
as if a lit match had been tossed upon a bucket of gasoline. His
delusions changed from spiders crawling the walls and following him
everywhere he went to deepening in both vividness and feeling. It wasn't
long before they morphed into ones in which demons had taken over his ex
and stole his son. He vowed vengeance for his loss and he swore he
would make the demons pay.

In his mind, his best friend Tom
Sanders was there helping him. Sure this Tommy didn't exactly act like
the one he knew and loved so well, but at least this one believed him
about the demons. This Tommy agreed that his ex and her new boyfriend
needed to die in order to save their souls. Thinking about it a little
longer he decided that he very much preferred Mind Tommy to Flesh Tommy.

He stood in that corner for three hours until the episode broke
and he could once again think normally. Once he was back in reality, he retched
and ran for the toilet.

The things he had done to his ex
had sickened and scared him. It didn't matter that he had only done them in his mind. He straightened after clearing his stomach
and flushed the bowl clean of his lunch. After rinsing out his mouth
with Scope he headed to what he termed his 'thinking' chair.

He
kept a pad of paper and a pen by the chair to record anything he might
need to know or remember when he was lucid. The notebook contained three sentences,
it took him a moment to grasp their meaning.

"Saw her with him today. She took him in your bed. While you degenerated in the corner."

It
was then he hatched his plan. He knew he'd have to kill her. Doing that
would stop his disease and appease God so that he wouldn't have the 'bad
times'. Besides if he killed her they'd only send him to an asylum
where someone could care for him again. He was insane, he had
ten years of medical files to back up his insanity defense.

A slow
grin spread across his face, a grin that lit his eyes with a mania that
would have scared him if he wasn't completely in his right mind. Yes
sir, he would make sure things went his way, and no one would hold him responsible.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

While I know editing is essential and even crucial to having a good finished product I absolutely loathe it. Aside from not having a ton of time with the two kids and old house that needs some love, there's the fact I am an unrelenting demon when I edit. I will scrutinize a page until it starts crying. But to me, the best way to have a good book is to make sure it's as close to flawless as you can get it.

I'm working on an anthology right now with a dozen or so short stories from my past and present. The ones from the past need some serious clean up because they were written when I had just begun down the road of writing. The newer ones also need a bit of love and care and I'm ok with giving it to them.

My problem is when I spend fifteen minutes wondering if I couldn't find a better synonym for this word, or if I ought to include this sentence here or there. A bit obsessive perhaps but I know in the end the story/novel/novella will be better off for it, but Jeesh, I hate editing.